Tales from The Trenches Archive

Streamlining

I work at a medium-sized developer, and we’re currently on a project under amazing amounts of stress. We don’t have enough people, turnover is really high, and firefighting is an everyday activity - like any software producer, I’m sure.

Our Leads have been locked up in meetings literally every day. So much so that they can’t get any work done or, say, lead their team. It was so bad, that our weekly Thursday 30-minute check in with our lead engineer had been cancelled 8 times in a row.

With this in mind, management instituted “No-Meeting Thursday.” As its name implies, all Thursday meetings were to be cancelled, to allow teams some time to work with their Leads. This week, when our meeting on No-Meeting Thursday rolled around, our Lead told us that the policy was going to be a real boon to us, because we could now have our meeting on No-Meeting Thursday. So we did.

This week, unfortunately, we were not able to have our meeting with our lead on No-Meeting Thursday, because it had been superseded by another, more important meeting.